Give Barack Obama credit for thinking big. Since taking office
this past January, the president has embarked upon a fundamental
reboot of American foreign policy. From semantic steps like the
renaming of the War on Terror to more substantive ones—including an
overhaul of defense priorities and new outreach to countries such
as Iran and Russia—the Obama administration has wasted no time
making clear that it plans to reshape the way the United States
interacts with the outside world.
Of all the initiatives now being contemplated by the White
House, none are more potentially farreaching than its plans for a
new diplomatic offensive toward the Muslim world. In his historic
April address to the Turkish parliament, the president promised a
political, cultural, and economic partnership “with people across
the Muslim world to advance our common hopes, and our common
dreams.” As the Obama administration embarks on this effort,
however, it is liable to find that longterm success hinges upon a
topic that is rarely discussed and even more poorly understood:
basic education in the Islamic world.
To understand the importance of this issue to the domestic
stability and political outlook of Muslim nations, one need only
look at Pakistan. Over the past three decades, Pakistan’s
educational sector has steadily atrophied, a casualty of neglect
and partisan politics. In its place has risen a parallel religious
education system built around a specialized Islamic curriculum
known as the Dars-e Nizami. Ostensibly, other
subjects—including mathematics, history, and medicine—are also
offered. But specialists such as Christine Fair of the United
States Institute of Peace are quick to point out that this falls
far short of a “wellrounded education,” since all the texts used
for instruction, even those for supposedly “rational sciences,” are
fundamentalist in nature, and many have stopped being taught
altogether in Pakistan’s more than 10,000 madaris (the
plural of madrassa).
Of those, Darul Uloom Haqqania in the country’s North-West
Frontier Province is among the most prominent. In the past, Darul
Uloom is known to have served as a training ground for Taliban
leaders, as well as a recruiting center for Pakistani militants
fighting in the disputed region of Kashmir. Today, Darul Uloom
still casts a long ideological shadow; more than 2,800 Pakistani,
Afghan, Tajik, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Chechen students are currently
estimated to be enrolled there. Also prominent are the Ahlehadith
madaris, located outside Lahore. These are known to have provided
fighters to Lashkare Taiba, the Kashmiri terrorist group
responsible for the bloody November 2008 assault on the Indian city
of Mumbai.
By objective standards, the size of the problem is still small.
Officials in Islamabad estimate that some 1.7 million students—just
1 percent of the country’s total population—are currently enrolled
in the madrassa system. Yet if even a fraction of that number
becomes radicalized enough to join the jihad against the West, it
would be a boon to terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and a major
challenge to the United States and its allies. And by all
indications, that is precisely what is happening in places such as
Afghanistan and Kashmir, where anecdotal evidence suggests that
local radicals are being reinforced by new recruits from Pakistan’s
Islamic schools.
Pakistan may be the most prominent example of this
radicalization, but it is hardly the only one. Indeed, the same
conditions that empowered the rise of a parallel, largely
unaccountable educational system in South Asia’s most unstable
state can be seen today throughout the rest of the Islamic
world.
IT WAS NOT ALWAYS THIS WAY. Between the eighth and tenth
centuries, Islamic thinkers pioneered significant new knowledge in
mathematics and astronomy. The same period saw the translation and
dissemination of classic books of literature and Greek philosophy
throughout the Muslim world, and new inventions that aided
technological and scientific discovery. Subsequent years, however,
saw a systematic closing of the Muslim mind, as the “gates” of
ijtihad—open, scholarly interpretation of Quranic
texts—were “closed” and clerical authority replaced intellectual
inquiry.
The cumulative effects of this change have been profound. Today
the Muslim world suffers from a crisis of education—one that has
systematically stripped that part of the world of the ability to
compete in the “geography of ideas.” Exactly how deep this deficit
runs is painfully clear. In its 2008 report on educational reform
in the Middle East and North Africa, the World Bank notes that the
countries of the region as a whole score far below countries like
Chile and Estonia in every area of “knowledge”— from the skills and
education level of their populations to the presence of an
infrastructure that reinforces and rewards learning. Adult
illiteracy in Arab states, meanwhile, stands at some 50 percent,
nearly double that of the rest of the Third World.
Intellectual curiosity, meanwhile, is sorely lacking. As a
whole, Arab countries translate “about 330 books annually, onefifth
of the number that Greece translates,” the UN Development
Programme’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report pointed
out. “The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph
Maa’moun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the
average that Spain translates in one year.” The Arabic world, in
other words, is an intellectual outlier, an area of the planet that
has failed to keep pace with others in the arena of thought, ideas,
and innovation.
This state of affairs represents a major challenge for the West.
According to the World Bank, “the population of 15 to 24 year-olds
accounts for 21.5 percent (approximately 70 million) of the
regional population, while another 45 percent is less than 15 years
of age.” In practical terms, this means that more than half of the
entire Middle East and North Africa is of school age and will
continue to be for at least another generation. Yet America so far
has paid far too little attention to this “youth bulge” or the
means by which it could shape its upbringing and outlook.
TO ITS CREDIT, early on the Bush administration appeared to
grasp the importance of education in the war of ideas now raging in
the Muslim world. In its 2002 National Security Strategy,
the Bush White House extolled the importance of “literacy and
learning” and committed to expanding its stake in education in the
Middle East and North Africa. And, reflecting this focus, by
mid2008 the U.S. government’s total investment in basic education
worldwide had risen to approximately $1.75 billion. Yet of that
sum, merely a third (some $650 million) was spent in the Islamic
world. And even those funds tended to be politicized—allocated
based, above all, on the recipient country’s ability to provide
“return on the dollar,” rather than its strategic significance in
what has come to be known as the Long War.
For all of its protestations about Bush foreign policy, the
Obama administration so far gives every indication of following in
its predecessor’s footsteps. While still on the presidential
campaign trail, then senator Barack Obama promised to establish a
$2 billion Global Education Fund in order to “offer an alternative
to extremist schools” abroad. Today, however, that plan remains
more rhetoric than reality. The president’s first budget request,
released publicly on May 7, included only a modest increase over
existing levels for basic education worldwide, and contented itself
with an amorphous pledge to continue “to study” the feasibility of
creating a global education fund at some later date.
Perhaps the most emblematic—and egregious— example of this
institutional neglect is Iraq. Militarily, the United States and
its allies have succeeded in turning the tide of battle decisively
away from al Qaeda and its affiliates, thanks in no small measure
to the “surge” strategy adopted by the Bush administration in 2007.
Intellectually, however, America has virtually taken itself out of
the running in helping to shape a liberal, pluralistic order in the
former Ba’athist state. That is because, since 2005, the U.S.
government, as a matter of official policy, has funded no basic
education programs there. Rather, educational projects—from the
building of schools to the acquisition of moderate textbooks—have
been relegated to the margins of the public policy debate over the
future of the Iraqi state, funded at the discretion of individual
military commanders.
Nor is any of this likely to change in the near future. As
recently as this past April, in an internal bureaucratic decision,
the Obama administration opted against allocating a nominal $20
million to fund basic education programs in Iraq. The reason? That
such an investment is likely to carry more entanglements and
political risks than tangible rewards for a White House interested
in ending its involvement in Iraq as soon as possible.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this
choice. Modernday Mesopotamia represents the cradle of the Islamic
kingdom so desired by al Qaeda and other Sunni radicals. Osama bin
Laden himself has termed Baghdad to be the “capital of the
caliphate,” and Iraq the epicenter of the “Third World War” now
raging between Islam and the West. The lack of serious, sustained
American engagement in the mechanics of basic education in Iraq,
therefore, is tantamount to an abdication of that arena to a host
of hostile ideologies—and an invitation to America’s adversaries to
engage where we have not.
Iraq, moreover, is a bellwether of sorts for Muslim education
writ large. Of the world’s 49 majority Muslim countries and
territories, nearly 40 percent currently do not receive American
basic educational assistance. This chronic failure to engage the
Islamic world on the battlefield of ideas, in turn, has permitted
no shortage of radical ideologies and intolerant ideas to take root
and wooed untold numbers of converts to the cause of America’s
adversaries. It has also made the United States a marginal force in
shaping the future of one of the world’s most volatile regions.
In his April address in Turkey, President Obama proclaimed his
belief that the Muslim world can be a partner in “rolling back the
violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject.” Making this
vision a reality, however, will require the Obama administration to
put its money where its mouth is and lay the educational foundation
necessary for such a meeting of the minds.
